Microsoft adds short animation to ease users into Metro
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 2nd Aug 2012 22:36 UTC
Windows Now that Windows 8 has gone gold, Microsoft can move on to other things. With Windows 8, the most important of these is probably to make sure people know how to actually use it. Metro is filled to the brim with hard-to-discover features, but Microsoft has a plan. Will it be enough?
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RE[2]: Bleh... not enough.
by tomcat on Mon 6th Aug 2012 17:47 UTC in reply to "RE: Bleh... not enough."
tomcat
Member since:
2006-01-06

I'd have to disagree, the Windows Runtime is just a new flavor of API presented in a better way. Its all COM underneath. All of the subsystems that make up Windows are there.


Moreover, WinRT provides access to these various subsystems across all language types -- C/C++, JavaScript Windows Web Applications (WWA), XAML, VB.NET, etc -- so you get the full power of Windows no matter what you code in. That's a big deal.

I think a lot of the grumbling around Windows 8 is because we've been getting half of the story. This fall the hardware will rise to match the software.


And this hardware is being held to a far more stringent standard than in the past.

All in ones will be touch enabled, mice will be touch sensitive and laptop track pads will be optimized for Windows 8.


It's going to be difficult to find machines that don't support touch beyond the next 3 years. People don't realize this yet.

I will concede that using current hardware, things are slightly more frustrating, though not terribly, its always something that either Microsoft or the App developer can engineer around.


This needs tuning. But they'll get plenty of feedback, and they clearly do listen; which is why we no longer have Active Desktop and other UI patterns which people didn't like.

The grand story here I think is the fact that Windows will finally have a centralized software repository and an OS managed installation experience. It should mean a lot less rot and issues with corrupted states due to faulty uninstallers, and a lot less malware.


Yes! That is the single biggest feature of this OS release. A store. Assuming that people only obtain software from the store, and Microsoft diligently monitors the store for malware, the overall user experience for users will be drastically better than today.

I think Microsoft if you look at their SDKs and general direction, is more Androidesque in developer freedom (look at huge strides in WP8 leaked SDK which shows a lot more dev freedom) and I hope they'll keep those ideals over time.


Well, I think it's a balance between developer freedom and user freedom. Windows 8 puts the user first. The developer doesn't get to play a lot of the tricks that they used to pull -- like stealing focus, sticking pop-ups in your face, jockeying for highest Z-order, using any device they want to use regardless of whether they were authorized to do so. Developers may not like that change because it diminishes their capabilities but, so what, computing is supposed to be about users, not developers. We're simply the guys who connect users with data. ;-)

I think the Linux Desktop is in an abysmal state right now. KDE is frankly a mess and Gnome is floundering. Maybe someone will do something disruptive soon to change all that, but I don't think most other OSes are better off wrt the future.


There are a certain number of people that will continue to use Linux no matter what the big players do. I salute their tenacity because Linux represents a different kind of openness; however, the end-to-end experience is often the thing that gets users excited. Unless the Linux desktop can nail that, it will remain fairly marginal as a desktop platform. Server? Different story.

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